YouSaid · the spoken record

Jake Sullivan

lines on the record: 79
first: 2018-01-04
most recent: 2018-01-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm not sure she knew exactly what she was getting into, but now she's stuck with me. Too late now. Yeah, right, exactly.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple years ago, am now learning how to make these kind of go through these collective decisions as opposed to just kind of what I want to turn around and do.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a viable option in a sense. It's something that sitting here today, I continue to be really passionate about the place I grew up, about my hometown, about the state of Minnesota. You know, we were talking about Hubert Humphrey and what he represents. And when I think of Minnesota, I think of people like Hubert Humphrey and those values. And so to be a part of that is something that would be very exciting. This, of course, is now no longer just a Jake decision. This is a family decision. And my wife and I have had a lot of conversations about where the two of us together would be best placed to make a difference and make an impact. So it's certainly possible that I end up trying to contribute to public life in Minnesota, maybe by running for office or in some other way. It's also possible that we choose to do something else. And that's what I got married actually during the campaign.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Withdrawing from the TPP with no multilateral effort to replace it and just leaving a big vacuum out there has absolutely handed China a strategic victory.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The United States retreating from a role of leadership in Asia and in the world of seating ground to China, of ceding ground to authoritarian dictators, of making our friends feel less comfortable and less confident in us. And in all of those senses, making us less safe and secure and reducing, I think, our long-run economic prospects because we really are creating circumstances in which China is going to be writing the rules rather than us. I think that is all.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't solve it. Right. The Obama administration didn't solve it. Bush administration, Clinton administration. So I don't want to just be a knee-jerk partisan on this, but it is hard to look at those 12 days and see them as anything other than.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was really disturbing 12 days. And I've tried my hardest on a lot of these difficult foreign policy issues, including North Korea, to not just be knee-jerk against everything this administration does. I think a North Korean particular, they're up against a really hard set of circumstances.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in a way it's handed, I think, Rahania and the Iranians a short-term victory in their foreign policy, but a very difficult political dynamic for Rouhani internally. The victory in their foreign policy is they get to go around to the rest of the world and say, we're the good guys, we're complying with the deal, we're doing our part. The Americans are the ones whose word you can't trust. And they're loving doing that right now. And I'm not saying it's entirely working, but it's having some effect elsewhere. It's making it harder for us to keep a united front against Iran. However, at the same time, Rohani now has to answer to the critics back home who said, see, we told you that you shouldn't have done this deal in the first place. And so he's in a bit of a perilous position, which I think it's not to our advantage to strengthen the hand of folks who ultimately want to walk away from this deal.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By creating this whole drama around will he or won't he stay in the deal or leave the deal, I think Trump is really taken everyone's eye off the ball of going after these other challenges that Iran poses, including the missiles, including its behavior in the region, so that everyone right now in Europe, in China, the other players we need to push back against Iran are worried more about the risk Washington poses than they are about the risk Tehran poses, and the brilliance of the Obama strategy on Iran was to make sure that the onus was constantly on Iran and the international community was with us. That's how we got those sanctions. That's how we got this deal. And Trump has flipped the script on that in ways that I think are damaging to our strategy. Also, they put the deal on thin ice because at any point now over the next year, he could just decide, you know what, I've decided since I've decertified, it's time for us to walk away.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what Trump did is there's a law that Congress passed that basically requires him every ninety days to certify that Iran is in compliance and that this deals in the interest of the United States. President declined to certify. What happens then is Congress has 60 days to decide whether it's going to snap back all the sanctions and essentially walk away from the deal. Congress is not doing that. Congress may pass some other law, but it's decided we're not walking away from this deal because even Republican critics recognize that walking away at this point makes no sense. However,”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. I mean, one way to do that is to go after the missiles. The other way of doing that is go after the nukes. And what we've done is go after the nukes and stop them from being able to do that. We made a judgment on the missiles themselves that we're not going to abide that. We'll continue putting pressure on them for their missile program, but we're not going to stop ourselves from getting all these nuclear constraints just because missiles aren't in the middle of this. If we can make sure they can never put a nuclear payload on top of a missile by curbing their nukes, that's a big win. And let's take that win.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, now the question on the missiles is we looked at this issue and basically said at the end of the day, to get a nuclear agreement, we have to make sure that they can't take a nuclear payload, put it on top of a missile, and deliver it anywhere. There are two ways to do that.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No sunset on all of those inspection provisions to make sure that that is the case. Some of the constraints, particularly on the uranium come off in the out years, and I do think we're going to need to deal with that with additional agreements down the road. But we don't need to renegotiate this deal to do that. We can do what we do with other arms control agreements. We can add provisions later at the appropriate time. Second argument is that it doesn't cover all of the regional activities of Iran. And of course that's true. This was an arms control agreement. It was meant to deal with Iran getting a nuclear bomb and stopping them from doing that. But we reserved the right in this deal to be able to go after Iran for its regional behavior however we want we have placed no constraints on ourselves whether it's economic pressure or it's intelligence-light operations or support for our partners in the region. All of that is available to us. And then the third argument is that Iran is just going to cheat.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very limited number of centrifuges and a tiny little stockpile, not enough for them to break out to get a bomb without giving us a huge amount of lead time to see it and stop them. And then the other aspect was to say, well, it's not good enough to know we've closed off those pathways. We also have to be able to make sure they're not cheating or doing something in secret. So we need the most comprehensive, most intrusive set of inspections anywhere in the world to check and see whether or not they're cheating, to deter them from trying to cheat and detect them if they do. So that's in place. Now, opponents of the deal basically make three arguments. The first is that it just ends on some date and after that date Iran is authorized to have as many bombs as it wants. That's just false. This is the sunset clause argument. There is no sunset on Iran's permanent commitment to never get a nuclear weapon.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, then that's on the Iranian side. On the uranium side, what we had them do was dismantle a whole bunch of centrifuges and then ship 98% of their low-enriched uranium, enough for what would have been 10 to 12 bombs worth if they had more highly enriched it, had them ship it out of the country so it was out of their possession. So they're left with”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's obviously an enormously complex technical issue, but when it boils down to it, what we're trying to do is stop Iran from being able to build a nuclear bomb. And there's only two ways to build a nuclear bomb. One is to get some highly enriched uranium and put it in a bomb, and the other is to get reprocessed plutonium and put it in a bomb. So you got to stop them from getting enough uranium or enough plutonium to do that. That's the name of the game. That requires a diplomatic agreement where essentially they give up enough of that capacity so you can be confident that they can't get there. So on the plutonium side, we had them essentially disable and pour concrete into their plutonium reactor and closed off that pathway.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your artwork in Minneapolis. Probably not even, right? Yes, I would have gone to some distant island. So I thought, you know, what if it's like Canadian disc jockeys who've figured out, I went back through my head. No, of course I was talking to the... The sky, I've talked to him before, and it was all okay, but I just had this two minutes of absolute terror. Which kind of, in a way, for me, ruined this incredible moment. You know, everyone else is.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the EEOB just across the street from the White House. And I came running over to see the senior national security team. And collectively, we went running breathlessly into the oval to ask the president if he'd be up for this. And he looked at us like, why are you even asking, you know, of course, let's get this going. And so I went down to the situation room to arrange the phone call. And the way it worked was I just had this guy's cell phone and one other guy's cell phone. And we were going to kind of patch these all together. And Rahani was going to get on the phone. So I went back up to the oval Ben Rhodes and Tony Blinken were there with the president. And as they were dialing President Rouhani in, I had this thought that this could be some giant prank. I'm just calling random cell phones.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a whole different deal. I mean, you're talking about a massive security establishment he doesn't control, a bunch of clerics he doesn't control, and of course the Supreme Leader himself. So his political exposure was of a different order than an American president's political exposure. And so he got cold feet on the meeting. And we were disappointed because we thought this would not only be a positive public statement of momentum in this process, but also would actually legitimately just help the diplomacy. So then that was early in the week. At the end of the week, literally as President Rahani was driving to the airport, the same guy that I'd been talking to called me up on a cell phone and said, hey, by the way, President Rahani's headed the airport, but he'd be open to having a phone call with President Obama. And so I was in my office.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're proud of the super special secret, double secret nature of this channel. And so So President Obama thought, you know, if he and Rouhani could just sit for a few minutes and basically reinforce the idea that the political will was there to get this done, that that would help give impetus for the negotiations. So I sat down privately in New York on the side of a hotel bar with a senior Iranian who was very close with President Rahani, and we talked about what it would take to get the two guys in the same room together. In the end,”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fair point. There are some of those secret channels that are more effective than others, right? You're right. Secret channels that are more effective than others, right? You're right. Yes, we're”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is a great example of how foreign policy can seem like a very distant thing, but it ends up being extremely human. President Obama had expressed interest in spending a few minutes just for a brief encounter with President Rouhani when he came to New York for the UN General Assembly. The idea basically being that we were in the thick of the negotiations at that point, and we had this secret channel going strong, although no one else outside really knew that.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that was the European Union, India, China, South Africa, Korea, it was countries on every continent of every size, of every degree of relationship with the United States, close friends, competitors, adversaries, and we stitched the whole thing together under the leadership of the president and the secretary. And that created a circumstance in which we could go to the Iranians because we had their attention and say, you know, if you went out from under all this, you're going to have to deal with us. And not just with us, but with the other world powers we've lined up behind us.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“President Obama Secretary Clinton went around the world like you said for two years twisting arms and basically saying to people you got to do a couple things. You got to cut off your oil purchases from Iran or at least dramatically reduce them and you got to freeze Iranian assets in your banks and stop doing the kind of business with them you were before. And they pulled it off. They not only got a security council resolution that laid the basis for this, but they actually got countries to follow through so that in 2012 Iran's oil exports had been reduced from 2.5 million barrels a day to one million barrels a day and tens of billions of dollars of Iranian assets were frozen overseas and their economy went through something like a 25% drop like a quarter of Iran's GDP just fell out the bottom all as a result of that work, of the work of building this global campaign of sanctions.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is getting countries to go against their economic interest, which is one of the hardest things that you can do when you're engaged in diplomacy is go to another country and say, hey, you're going to lose a bunch of money on this deal, but this is important to us, so you have to come along.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were they prepared to actually make a deal? And the reason that President Obama and Secretary Clinton decided twenty twelve was the right time to try this was the sanctions were finally biting, and Iran was feeling the pinch, they were feeling economic pressure, and we knew that if we went and said, you know, if you want to get sanctions relief, you're going to have to work with us, that they would have to consider that very carefully. It turned out the answer at that point, the answer to the first question was yes, these guys were serious. They were real. They were authorized. But the answer to the second question was no. They weren't yet ready to talk in a meaningful way about the kind of constraints they'd have to accept for their program.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the summer of 2012, President Obama and Secretary Clinton decided to send a very small team of us to Oman, which is a country on the Persian Gulf, and had agreed to be a broker between the US and Iran for a direct dialogue with Iranian diplomats about whether or not we could resolve the nuclear issue with Iran in a peaceful manner. So three of us went. We flew commercial. We flew under the radar. We showed up in the capital of Oman, Muscat. We sat with the Iranians basically to explore two questions. First, were these Iranians authorized? Did they actually have the imprimatur of the Supreme Leader and the authorities in Tehran to make a deal, or were they just kind of freelancers and guys off the street? And second, were they serious?”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are asking the questions. Everyone's going to say, here's exactly how it happened. And I certainly don't want my saying, I didn't know who paid for the dossier to suggest I'm saying I want to distance myself from it by no means am I saying that? I mean, I believe that it is perfectly appropriate and responsible if we get wind or people associated with the campaign get wind that there may be real questions about the connections between Donald Trump, his organization, his campaign in Russia, that that be explored fully. And by the way, I think the Congress agrees with me. The Justice Department agrees with me. And at this point, we're finding out more and more that's deeply troubling. So it's not, there's nothing about it that from my perspective is concerning. All I can say is that I learned who funded the dossier pretty much when everyone else did.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm shocked in this casino. Look, I mean, yeah, the bottom line is that the effort by the Republicans to suggest in this very weird twisted way this was collusion with the Russians is completely bizarre. The idea that a campaign would seek to pay for opposition research is as old as campaigns themselves. And so, yeah, why would I own it?”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I didn't know who was paying for this up until a few days before the announcement when I learned that the campaign and the DNC, the announcement being just a few weeks ago that the campaign and the DNC had paid for it.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I first saw the dossier when it was published by BuzzFeed in whenever that was, January, February of 2017. And I had no idea.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was going on? And then my concern grew over the course of the rest of the campaign because of the signals we were seeing that suggested this wasn't going to stop with the DNC. And the drum beat of things like Stone and Assange and others saying there's more coming, Pedestas coming, et cetera.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had been hit by foreign intelligence intrusions, other campaigns had. But it was always kind of, can we figure out who the personalities are and what policies are they going to pursue? It wasn't to weaponize the information that was taken. So I kind of assume that that was going to be a cost to doing business in this campaign. So it wasn't until the Democratic National Convention when the information was leaked and you could see there was a different game afoot here that I thought, okay, they are now doing something. They're executing a playbook in the United States that they've executed in Europe before, which is now no longer just hack, but hack and leak and leak selectively in ways that try to damage a candidate. And pretty quickly after we saw those first leagues hit, we started calling out the Russians even before the intelligence community did because at that point we knew.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to say it took me a little while. When I first had suspicions that they were rooting around in the systems, I thought this has happened before. You know, the Obama campaign.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Show it. And there was a number of reasons for that, some of which were self-inflicted, some of which had to do with Donald Trump, and some of which had to do with the way that the infrastructure of covering Hillary Clinton got built up. It just there wasn't a lot of appetite for saying, okay, we're going to take the next hour the way that they did with Trump and just give you Hillary Live and you can decide for yourself. She rarely got that opportunity.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She did not get the opportunity. And then, of course, Trump comes along and everything, all 24 hours a day is about Trump. She did not get the opportunity to be seen in the kind of direct engagement circumstances where I think she could be and often was extremely effective. One time when the press finally turned to her and said, hey, look, this is something she's saying something you should pay attention to was, of course, it was about Trump. It was the speech she gave in San Diego on foreign policy. And press covered it. They showed it from start to finish. They played clips of it. They said, oh my God, you know, she's funny and she's human and she's making a good argument. But that was pretty rare. It's not her doing that, I think, was far less rare than her opportunity to.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, whatever, well, but at the same time, when you try something and it just doesn't work, you gotta maybe try something else. But whatever responsibility sheer, we bear for that, the bottom line is.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That story, yeah, but honestly, to be honest with you, I think part of the reason for that is I think she was really confused as to how this had taken on this level of importance in the race. And in hindsight, it's fair to ask whether or not that really was responsible and fair. And so I do think she just is a human reaction. Thought she could resolve it relatively expeditiously. It obviously was hanging around and hanging around and there's no doubt then that she was experimenting with different ways of trying to finally put the thing to bed and it kept going. So whatever responsibility she bears experimentally experimentally”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, 2016 is a funny year because when she had her moments to actually be unfiltered, kind of speaking to the American people, particularly in the debates, and when she had opportunities to work with, direct in the room with crowds as she was going around the country, I think she was way more effective than she has given credit for. What we failed to do was somehow be able to break through the noise of everything, including emails, which helped blot out the sun.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be one moment, and all of a sudden it'd be there it goes again, and then she would respond to that, and she'd respond to that by tightening up a bit and so on. So I think especially in 2016, a lot of people carried, journalists carried priors into the race about her and how she was as a candidate and so forth that ended up having an impact on the race itself in addition to some of her natural instincts.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep sort of one eye open for attacks coming her way. That exists to a certain extent. I think that is a real, has been a real issue. And I think there's a couple dimensions to it. One is obviously she's been around a lot. She's had a lot thrown at her. So naturally she's developed some armor and response to that. I think part of it is related to gender as well that as a female candidate, particularly a female candidate for president, she felt she had to walk a different kind of line than a male candidate would have to. But I also think that there becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy about this, if that makes sense. Like it becomes a doom loop that's hard to get out of that, in fact, she'd go through a dozen interviews where she was nothing but kind of free and open and easygoing and showed all of the wonderful attractive sides of her.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get held to a higher standard when you run for president. And from a political perspective, I'm not debating the negative impact by any means, but I would want to push back on the idea that this actually is a reflection of a personality trait. I really just don't buy that. That was not my experience in the four years that I spent working with her or in our exchanges or correspondence, which, as it's been exposed to the world to see, shows somebody who was doing her job and doing it very effectively. I think the larger question of kind of the suit of armor, you know, of her putting on the suit of armor and feeling like... She's”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think she and I were both enormously proud, not just of the work we did at state, but of the correspondence that's contained in that email. And I think, of course, it was a boneheaded move in the end, right? Of course it was. There's no doubt about it. But there was nothing about it at the time that I think struck her as trying to execute some stealthy agenda that she was trying to hide something. And, you know, I honestly think that as much as people don't really want to buy the answer, it was she was on a personal email system in the Senate. She moved over to something that already existed. It's not like she went out and bought a private server and set it up. Her husband had something for the foundation that she moved this onto. And that's what she used. And, you know, previous secretaries of state had done it. Other people had done it who are not being assigned a kind of like grander scheme for why they were using personal email that has been ascribed to her.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, the first thing I would say with the email piece, I absolutely acknowledge the way the political narrative developed was that this was placed in a broader case about her around somehow being stealth, being stealthy or whatever. I don't actually buy that as being what was behind what happened with her decision on the email.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it didn't. I mean, this was, first of all, she had transitioned from a private email account in the Senate, which many senators had, to a private email as a secretary of state, which many other cabinet secretaries had. So I presumed, as I think many other people did, dozens, if not hundreds of people who were communicating with her, that this had been worked out logistically through technical arrangements with the right people. So I didn't give it a second thought while I was at the State Department. I did not feel that there was anything untoward about it while I was there. And, you know, whether it's Secretary of Defense or the administrator of the EPA or other senior cabinet secretaries, this was not uncommon practice.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with that. I'm not arguing that even looking forward, they would have said that. I'm just saying that. How bad an idea it was, like how. How much it hurt, and it hurt a lot.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is the point, though, right? Is that President Obama's opponent was the ultimate corporate plutocrat. But the argument against him was kind of made in a way that it was very personal to Romney. And it was about some of the core Republican philosophy of trickle down and what Romney was putting forward in his platform. But there wasn't a reckoning of the kind that we ended up having in 2016 around the banks particularly, around Wall Street and what happened with Wall Street in 2008. And so the toxicity of the Wall Street issue. Heading into 2016 and the populist surge of Bernie Sanders was something, I don't even think Bernie Sanders himself saw just how deep it was when he got in the race, let alone everybody.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 2012, there was nobody like a Bernie making the argument essentially that said, you got to break it all up, you gotta upend the system altogether. I would say there was a bit of a bit of sort of”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of the team that was working on those issues, she says in her book that, of course, this ended up being a mistake and in particular the optics of it and how it As you said, played into a larger critique about her. I don't think she saw that at the time. I have to say, I wasn't there, but I don't think I would have seen that at the time in 2013. And let me just take a sec to explain why, because it seems so obvious in hindsight giving speeches to banks is a bad idea. It's that... What's funny about the 2016 election is that in many ways it played out issues that were deferred from the 2012 election. So you had the financial crisis in 2008 and people are pissed off at Wall Street and they're pissed off that the banks that get a bailout and they don't.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time that she was doing that, I had that was after she left the State Department and I had moved from the State Department to the White House where I was serving as Vice President Biden's National Security Advisor. So In the swirl of the Iran negotiations and so forth. So I wasn't.”
2018-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 205 - Jake Sullivan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source